Dropbox Gains The Ability To Sync Only Selected Folders

[Windows, Mac & Linux ] Dropbox is one of my favorite utilities – I’ve been using Dropbox since its private beta days. Dropbox offers probably the easiest and simplest way of ensuring that all your files are in sync. A tiny niggle that Dropbox had so far, was that the entire sync folder was self contained. So if you had a particular set of files/documents that you needed to sync, you had to save them in folder created under Dropbox sync folder. There have been workarounds – creating symbolic links in Linux, or Junctions in Windows ( only for NTFS filesystems however) but these have been clumsy.

Yesterday, Dropboxer Michael posted a new forum thread announcing an experimental build which is capable of… well, you guessed it, selective sync. So let’s see how this works.

Once you’ve installed the build, right click on Properties, select the Advanced tab, and you’ll see that the Selective sync option is visible. However, you won’t be able to use it right away, you’ll have to wait a bit till the initial sync is complete.

Once the initial sync is done, you’ll be given an option to to select the folders that you want to sync to. Check/uncheck the required folders and you’re done!

While I’ll admit this is not exactly what I really wanted ( I want Dropbox to be able to sync any folder on any drive – this feature will come soon in the 0.9 release, once this experiment is successful) – for the time limited selective sync should work fine.

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Sathya Bhat

Sathyajith aka "Sathya" or "cpg" loves working on computers, and actively participates in many online communities. Sathya is a Community Moderator on Super User, a collaboratively maintained Q&A site which is part of the Stack Exchange network. Sathya also contributes to and is a Super Moderator at Chip India Forums. While not writing SQL queries or coding in PL/SQL, Sathya is also a gamer, a Linux enthusiast, and maintains a blog on Linux & OpenSource. You can reach Sathya on twitter. View all posts by Sathya Bhat